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public health
We Don’t Throw People Away: Why I Support a Harm Reduction Approach in LA
We have a moral responsibility to set an example for the rest of the nation: one that’s rooted in compassion, humanity, and data-driven approaches.
May 07, 2025
If you were drowning, I wouldn’t ask how you got there before throwing you a lifeline.
I wouldn’t tell you to swim harder.
I wouldn’t tell you to make better choices, I wouldn’t hope you sink, and I wouldn’t put you in a cage.
If you were drowning, I would reach for you, pull you up, and do everything in my power to keep you alive.
That’s what harm reduction is: keeping people alive.
We don’t criminalize someone for losing a limb to the effects of diabetes. We don’t arrest them for not taking their insulin or for struggling to manage their blood sugar. We surround them with medical care, support systems, and resources to help them live healthier lives.
The first step isn’t forcing someone into a system they aren’t ready for. The first step is keeping them alive long enough to say yes.
Problematic substance use—a chronic, relapsing disease—is no different. And harm reduction is one of the many courses of medical action we’re taking to address this in MacArthur Park, Los Angeles, where the opioid crisis and homelessness collide in painful, visible ways.
I understand the frustration. I hear the anger. Lock them up, people say—oblivious to the harrowing truth that this crisis is made profoundly worse in our jails.
I want a healthy, accessible, thriving MacArthur Park just as much as my neighbors; a MacArthur Park where hardworking families aren’t forced to live amid trauma and visible substance use. But let me be clear: I don’t throw people away—and I don’t invest in failed solutions.
People don’t wake up one day and decide to become homeless or addicted. They end up there because they’ve been failed by an economic system that keeps people in poverty, by a housing system that makes rent impossible to afford, by a criminal justice system that treats problematic substance use like a crime instead of a disease, by a political system that chronically underfunds mental health, and by a for-profit healthcare system that allowed big pharmaceutical companies to manufacture the opioid epidemic and knowingly steal thousands of lives in exchange for billions of dollars.
We’ve spent over a trillion dollars on the failed War on Drugs, and the availability and potency of illicit drugs have only increased—along with our prison population.
It’s time for a different approach.
Decades of research have shown that harm reduction strategies provide significant public health benefits, including preventing deaths from overdoses and preventing transmission of infectious diseases. That’s why our office partnered with the LA County Department of Health Services and Homeless Healthcare Los Angeles (HHCLA) to deploy an overdose response team in the park seven days a week. Every day, they provide wound care, hygiene kits, naloxone, methadone, and harm reduction tools to people experiencing problematic substance use. They clean up biohazardous waste, picking up and safely disposing of left-behind needles and pipes that put our families in danger. They do the work that Recreation and Parks and LAPD can’t while reducing call volume to emergency responders, and we are all safer for it.
Since launching in late 2024, this team has collected over 14,000 hazardous items and distributed more than 3,600 naloxone kits—totaling over 11,000 doses of life-saving medication—and saved 52 lives. Those 52 people have names and faces and stories and hopes and dreams. They are someone’s child, someone’s friend, someone who now has a shot at accepting treatment, because we know that recovery isn’t a straight path—it takes multiple touchpoints. The first step isn’t forcing someone into a system they aren’t ready for. The first step is keeping them alive long enough to say yes.
I also want to be clear about what our office can and cannot do. The City Council cannot make arrests. What we can do is invest in solutions. We can choose to fund the strategies that actually reduce harm, that save lives, that address the root causes of these crises. Or, we can choose to push people out of sight and throw them away.
The fight for humanity goes far beyond MacArthur Park. We see it happening across the country. We see it in how President Donald Trump treats immigrants like pawns, willing to let families suffer for cheap political points. We see it in how he attacks the LGBTQ+ community, stripping away protections and treatment, denying their very existence. We see marginalized communities degraded and vilified and sacrificed at the altar of power, and we see misinformation peddled at every turn to satiate a hungry, desperate base. It is easy to dehumanize. It is easy to discard people. It is easy to think of human lives as inconvenient. But we have to resist that urge. We are better than that in Los Angeles. We have a moral responsibility to set an example for the rest of the nation: one that’s rooted in compassion, humanity, and data-driven approaches. And since my very first day in office, that’s what I’ve always done, no matter how uphill the battle may be.
MacArthur Park is struggling. Yes, we are frustrated, scared, and sometimes, angry. But I refuse to abandon the people suffering in front of us.
We don’t throw people away. We fight for them.
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America’s Safety Is Fragile; Trump Is Tearing Down the Systems That Protect It
The systems that protect our lives and our communities were built through years of tireless effort. They can’t be allowed to collapse overnight.
May 05, 2025
America in 2025 is safer than it’s been in years. After a devastating surge during the early pandemic—when the U.S. homicide rate rose more than 30%—homicide rates have since plummeted. In 2024 alone, they dropped 16% nationally, one of the sharpest declines since the FBI began keeping national data.
This progress isn’t happenstance. It’s the direct result of deliberate investments in policy, research, and community-led strategies that addressed the underlying reasons for crime and violence. This progress is now under direct assault as the Trump administration has moved swiftly to dismantle the vital systems that keep Americans safe. In the last two weeks, the Justice Department canceled hundreds of critical grants to local governments and community organizations that fund violence prevention and public safety programs. Hundreds of National Science Foundation grants were terminated, including my own, following infiltration from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. If these rollbacks continue, we risk reversing years of progress and returning to a more violent, less stable future.
In Camden, New Jersey—where I teach at Rutgers University and serve as director of research at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center—the turnaround has been particularly dramatic. Just over a decade ago, Camden was written off as the “murder capital of the country.” In 2013, the small city of 75,000 people saw 57 homicides. In 2024, that number dropped to 17—a historic low. Today, fewer families are grieving, and fewer children are growing up in the shadow of violence. For a city long abandoned by political will and public imagination, this transformation offers a lesson in what’s possible when communities and institutions work together.
We must demand that our leaders defend our right to safety—not just from crime, but from neglect, disinvestment, and political sabotage.
The progress in Camden was not inevitable. It was built—piece by piece—through hard-won investments in community violence prevention and a complete overhaul of the city’s police force. And in recent years, we’ve seen similar progress unfold across the country in reducing violence—driven by a surge in federal investment and coordination.
In the wake of the pandemic, the Biden administration invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the kind of labor-intensive work that makes communities safer through the Community-Based Violence Intervention Initiative and provisions within the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Laws were passed to extend background checks, implement life-saving red flag laws, and crack down on gun traffickers. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives regulated ghost guns and the kits used to assemble them, curbing the surge of untraceable firearms on our streets. The White House even established an Office of Gun Violence Prevention to lead these efforts. Federal funding allowed grassroots organizations to hire street outreach workers and get help to those affected by violence before more harm was done.
States and cities followed suit, creating their own offices of violence prevention and refocusing law enforcement efforts on the those at highest risk while improving community relations. For the first time in decades, a coherent, multi-sector approach to safety led by the federal government was beginning to take hold. It was working.
All of that is now under threat.
Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has moved swiftly to dismantle the vital systems that keep Americans safe. The administration’s attacks are wide-ranging but the bigger picture is what matters. These aren’t isolated cuts or rollbacks. Taken together, they amount to a deliberate dismantling of the very infrastructure that underpins public safety in this country.
On his first day in office, Trump shuttered the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. In recent weeks, the Department of Health and Human Services initiated massive layoffs, including nearly the entire Division of Violence Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Programs that tracked injuries and deaths—like the Web-Based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS)—have gone dark. Researchers at universities across the country have had their federal funding frozen, stalled, or revoked, often with no official explanation. A group of House Republicans, led by Rep. Diana Harshbarger of Tennessee, has even called for a complete ban on federal research aimed at preventing gun violence—an attack not just on science, but on the very idea that violence is a problem we can solve.
The Department of Justice has also reversed course. A zero-tolerance policy for lawbreaking gun dealers, established under the Biden administration, has been eliminated. The result: Dealers who sell firearms without background checks or falsify records are now far less likely to lose their licenses. Attorney General Pam Bondi is reviewing lifesaving gun regulations, including a rule closing the gun show loophole and a ban on certain AR-style firearm attachments used in mass shootings. These policies were hard-fought and evidence-based. Now, they’re on the chopping block.
None of this is abstract. Research, policy, and funding are what make real-world safety possible. Without them, outreach workers and police officers can’t do their jobs. Emergency room partnerships break down. Communities lose tools to anticipate and prevent violence. Safety doesn’t just happen. It is produced through effort, coordination, and care. And when those systems collapse, people die.
Violence is not just a crime issue. It is a preventable threat to public health, even if the administration denies it. It spreads, it scars, and it sickens. It takes our children, hurts those who are most marginalized, and it divides us. The recent gains in safety are fragile—hard-earned, but easily reversed. If the systems that made that progress possible are dismantled, the violence will return. We can’t take this moment for granted, and we cannot afford to stand by while it’s undone.
We must demand that our leaders defend our right to safety—not just from crime, but from neglect, disinvestment, and political sabotage. The systems that protect our lives and our communities were built through years of tireless effort. They can’t be allowed to collapse overnight. The cost is too great. The consequences, unthinkable. It’s time to reclaim public safety as a public good, and to fight—loudly—for the systems that make peace possible.
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The Only Demand Trump Needs to Hear: ‘You’re Fired!’
Given his wreckage of lives, livelihoods, health, safety, and freedom of speech here and abroad in just 100 days, Trump invites daily the unifying command arising out of his declaration of war against the American people.
May 03, 2025
Of all the epithets seething from the foul mouth of King Donald I (his preferred title)—“deranged,” “wacko,” “lunatic,” “crazy,” “crooked,” “loser,” “criminal,” “corrupt,” the most timely, functional one is his favorite: “YOU’RE FIRED.”
Launched from his TV program, The Apprentice, while a failed businessman, Trump, using the poisonous tusks of Elon Musk, has conveyed that exit phrase to hundreds of thousands of innocent public servants, performing crucial tasks, and their contractors since January 20, 2025.
Given his wreckage of lives, livelihoods, health, safety, and freedom of speech here and abroad in just 100 days, Trump invites daily the unifying command arising out of his declaration of war against the American people—red state and blue state—“YOU’RE FIRED!”
Trump, a corporation masquerading as a Human, must be unmasked by the following bill of particulars:
Because you’re first “presentation of self” on January 20 was to declare that you are the law and that no constitution, statute, or regulation was going to stop your issuance of scores of illegal Executive Order Dictates, “YOU’RE FIRED!” The Constitution does NOT provide for either a Monarch or a Dictator!
Because on and after January 20, 2025, you launched a major PURGE of lawfully acting civil servants, including 17 inspectors general mandated to root out criminal and fraudulent activities, and top officials in the Pentagon, Intelligence, and Regulatory agencies without reason and notice, replacing them with sycophants, “YOU’RE FIRED!”
Because you are daily CENSORING and IMPERILING people, protected by our First Amendment, with police state kidnappings, illegal imprisonment in foreign and domestic jails, threats, harassment, bigotry, and outright criminal extortions for unlawful demands, “YOU’RE FIRED!”
Because you have repeatedly violated congressional mandates, including the power of the purse and health and safety standards, and because you have illegally seized basic congressional authority under the Constitution, having defied over 125 congressional subpoenas in your first term, destroying our federal checks and balances, “YOU’RE FIRED!” (See, Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All by Mark Green and me, published in 2020).
Because you are rampantly and unlawfully dismantling or closing down virtually all the long-established regulatory and scientific research, protections of the health, safety, and economic well-being of the American people, families, and children, within the areas of consumer, worker, environmental, and community necessities—many life-saving, “YOU’RE FIRED!”
Because you favor even greater power of large corporations to receive bloated contracts, subsidies, and giveaways; with impunity defraud the government, as with Medicare and Medicaid and military contracts; take over more of the public lands; and see scores of existing federal enforcement cases against them halted or dismissed, “YOU’RE FIRED!”
Because you have destroyed more of the working civil service than all previous presidents combined, you have left the American people more defenseless against pandemics, climate violence, air and water pollution, hunger, infectious diseases, and corporate crimes, “YOU’RE FIRED!”
Because you are demanding Congress pass more tax cuts and tax escapes for the very under-taxed super-wealthy, like you and your family members, and giant corporations, and because you have turned the White House into a self-enrichment business for you and your cronies, “YOU’RE FIRED!”
Because you have extended your cruel and vicious destructions against innocents abroad receiving life-saving medicine, food, and medical supplies from the U.S. Agency for International Development that you unlawfully have closed down, millions of poor people are in jeopardy and many thousands already dying and starving. You are told about these tragedies you have caused but could care less. Your zigzagging on massive tariffs destabilizing U.S. businesses and their workers is leading more of your supporters to question your competence and wrongheaded policies. Because regarding the Israeli genocide and slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and casualties mounting in the West Bank, you have backed your master Netanyahu even more than Bibi-Biden, greenlighting breaking the truce, resuming mass murder and starvation, pushing for expulsion of the entire surviving population, and approving annexation of the West Bank, “YOU’RE FIRED!”
Because every day you lie, and make false statements as a routine deceptive practice (over 35,000 lies and false statements listed by The Washington Post during your first term), you are creating harmful, false scenarios. Together with Musk enriching his corporate positions in Washington, you lie about each day’s realities such as the price of eggs being down 85%, our country now having a trade surplus, and your approval rating in polls “in the 60s and 70s,” “YOU’RE FIRED!”
Because your erratic, wild, and no-holds-barred fascist dictatorial corporate state “first” behavior proceeds from a dangerously unstable personality, driven by your insatiable vengeance as a megalomaniacal power freak, ignorant of or oblivious to circumstances and consequences, your continued wreckage in all directions is certain to worsen and shatter our Republic and its constitutional processes, “YOU’RE FIRED!”
Expanding numbers of Americans from all backgrounds who see the deadly months ahead of Dangerous Donald need to sum up their demands in the siren call “YOU’RE FIRED!” Just as was done to President Richard Nixon for far less serious transgressions in 1974.
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